


So They're Both Short Fuses

by KrisseyCrystal (IceCreAMS), silver_fish



Series: What Rises From the Depths x Of Storm and Ash [1]
Category: A Saga of Light and Dark - T. J. Chamberlain, Original Work
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Alternate Universe, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Arguing, Canon Universe, Crossover, Gen, Hot Chocolate, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Nerissa and Endric have Anger Issues, Nightmares, cause like...its important
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23383789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceCreAMS/pseuds/KrisseyCrystal, https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver_fish/pseuds/silver_fish
Summary: Endric and Mordecai thought their encounters with the weird and abnormally strange were over.Then they find a winged girl unconscious in the snow.
Relationships: Original Character & Original Character, Original Female Character & Original Male Character
Series: What Rises From the Depths x Of Storm and Ash [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1681918
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	So They're Both Short Fuses

**Author's Note:**

> Krissey's Notes: WOW SO LIKE ngl this was one of the funnest, most self-indulgent things I have ever had the pleasure of collaborating on. AN ABSOLUTE DELIGHT. What started as a giggle-fest between Taylo and I about "what if's" between our OC's became a huge behemoth of feels and late-night convo's and our favorite tropes. Here we are, man. 
> 
> Set post-WRFtD.
> 
> taylor's notes: WE TRULY DID HAVE A BLAST. unlike krissey's ocs in this fic, nerissa is i guess at the very bottom of her final character arc and she's kind of going through it here as a result (sorry, nerissa, but not really). this is obviously an au, but takes place around the beginning of ofs.
> 
> please enjoy!

“…dude, do you think she’s dead?”

“Uh…” Mordecai snorts. “I don’t think so?”

“What do you mean you ‘don’t think so’? Damn it, man. You just said this girl with wings is lying face-down in the snow and like, nothing else. Are you pulling my leg again? Because let me tell you, I was not a fan of that last shit you tried. If this is another moose incident, I swear I’m gonna—”

“—it’s not.” Mordecai laughs incredulously, like he can’t believe himself as he says it, “I’m telling you the truth. There’s a girl here, in the snow, with these large…black…uh, raven-looking wings.”

“Sounds fuckin’ wicked.” Endric heaves out a breath. He shifts his weight in the snow as a frown pulls hard at the corners of his mouth. “But damn. Really? First Arvelle, and now…”

“That’s what I was thinking.” 

_How come we keep finding the weird ones?_

“Well, is she _alive_? Or are we just going to stand here and let her freeze to death—whatever she is?” Endric prompts. He rocks his weight up onto his toes and back down to his heels. “Because I was ready to get back to the house and curl up next to the fire like, as soon as possible, but I bet she’d probably like that, too, in her case. Who knows how long she’s been out here.”

“Can’t have been long,” Mordecai mumbles. Snow crunches under his boots as he steps towards the prone girl; her long brown hair curls into the snow, splayed out on either side of her like her open wings. “She wasn’t here when we were on our way up the mountain, I can tell you that.”

“Yeah, I thought you might’ve mentioned something if you _had_ seen her.”

Mordecai rolls his eyes at Endric’s wry tone. His mittened hands reach for the girl’s head and give a gentle poke. 

She doesn’t stir.

“Everything okay?” 

Mordecai reaches out, placing a hand under the bend of one of the feathered wings. When he lifts it, he can get a better look at the girl and the loose white tunic she wears and the sandals laced up her tanned calves. He hitches a pitying breath. “Yeah. She is just... _not_ dressed for Qetaq weather. At all. Her shirt looks pretty thin; her sleeves have holes. She’s even wearing shorts, I think.”

“Damn. What’s she doing this far north, then?”

“Beats me.” 

There’s a worried lilt to Mordecai’s voice—one Endric immediately recognizes. He sighs. 

“We’re taking her home with us, aren’t we?”

“We’re taking her home with us.”

Mordecai takes it as a compliment when Endric doesn’t object.

* * *

When Nerissa wakes up, the very first thing she registers is that her entire body is _aching_. Not unlike the first time she woke up after binding herself to the Heavens, the ache starts in her shoulders and goes down from there. This time, though, it feels more like she’s taken a hard fall than spent too long holding up something heavy.

The second thing she registers is that this is _definitely_ not Emerson’s house.

Maybe she should be more observant, after the many long months of war that have kept her firmly on her toes, but it takes a considerable amount of time before she notices that the mattress she’s lying on is softer than the one she’s gotten used to in Hathet, and the room is entirely void of other people. It’s warmer here, too, as if someone has closed the window rather than leaving it open through the night as Emerson always does.

Slowly, she sits up to take in her surroundings in more detail. Definitely, she is nowhere _near_ Emerson’s house. As she looks around, she tries to recall how she got here, but…

Yesterday, they were trying to find their way to Uneo to meet up with the Erebusian Civil Front. She remembers Emerson leading them through Chronos’s Gate, and then…

Well, that’s it.

She looks up to the ceiling in frustration. She was _sure_ these little lapses in memory left her weeks ago, when Ada deemed her “fully recovered,” but maybe that isn’t exactly the case. Maybe she’s in Uneo now, and Isobel or Avery or Emerson have carried her someplace to sleep. It was her first time through the Gate, after all, since Chaos gave her her wings.

Her _wings_.

Now, she understands why her shoulders are aching so fiercely. Just like when she woke up in Hathet all those weeks ago, they’re spread out from her shoulders, the feathers ruffled from sleep.

She sighs, thinking not for the first time that these things are far more trouble than they’re worth. Focussing hard, she tries to will the magic down and make them go away again, but—

Nothing happens.

Frustrated (and uncomfortable, with these stupid things taking up more of the bed than the rest of her body seems to), she closes her eyes, purses her lips, and tries again.

But if anything, now they only feel even heavier on her shoulders.

“You have to be _kidding_ me,” she mutters, and her eyes fly open wildly as the sound of something hitting the floor not far from her reverberates through the room.

“What the _fuck_.” 

It’s barked out as a statement and less as a question as Endric stands dumbly with seafood stew tickling his toes, spilled out onto the bedroom floor. Mordecai’s going to kill him for ruining this handwoven rug. Again. “Damn it. Why don’t you _warn_ a guy when you’re awake?”

“S…sorry?”

Her voice is young, refined. Endric’s never heard her accent before: rolling and attractive. For some reason, it makes him think of hilly vineyards and a bright summer sun and the tang of olives on his tongue. 

Weird.

Endric rolls a shoulder. “Whatever. At least you’re awake. Now Mordecai can stop worrying his ass off about you.” He moves to turn and grab a towel, but stops. “Uh, but hey. Now that you’re awake, how’re you feeling? You doin’ okay, I guess?”

“Okay,” she repeats. The word feels heavy in her mouth. “I suppose so, but…” She bites her tongue and looks him over. He certainly doesn’t _look_ like what she was expecting from the people in the group—she was picturing, perhaps, a gathering similar to Adonis’s group back in Aether, made up of young faces hardened with revolution—but she’s hardly one to judge based only on appearances. “Are you one of Emerson’s friends?”

“Emerson? Who the hell is that?” Endric turns to the girl again, soup all but forgotten. Quickly, he zips through all of the people he's met—or remet as the case may be—in Illqanaat. A frown stretches across his face. “You're not from around here, are you.” Another statement less than a question.

There's a bit too long of a pause before he can hear the girl warily say: “Depends where ‘here’ is, I guess.”

“You know how weird that sounds, right?” Endric huffs. That soup is cooling on his toes, sticky and growing quickly uncomfortable. He probably needs to clean it up soon. “You really don't know where you are?” 

She narrows her eyes at him. “ _Should_ I know where I am? I’ve certainly never been here before. In this room, I mean. This isn’t Uneo, is it?”

Uneo? 

She doesn’t seem to need an answer. She heaves a massive sigh and swings her legs over the side of the bed. Rising on shaky legs, she stretches her arms high and then turns to look at Endric again, trying to get a sense of what, exactly, she’s dealing with.

“I don’t remember what happened,” she finally explains. “Where are my companions? There were seven of us.”

S—

—seven?

“So, uh, listen, I’m probably not the best judge of like, any of this, but I’m fairly certain when we found you, there was only one of you.” Mordecai would’ve mentioned if there were more. Endric doubts he would’ve been able to keep quiet; they would’ve had significantly less floor space right now if that was the case. Which would have been a major tripping hazard for him, what with burrito-people wrapped in their fluffiest blankets and laying across every spare place they had. 

They don’t have a lot of spare space in the _first_ place.

Endric sighs and raises his left hand to scratch at his neck. “Look. I’m going to clean up the soup I spilled. I’ll get Mordecai to bring you some more, and then how about you tell us what happened?” He shrugs; his hand falls back to his side. “If you got separated from your friends, maybe we can retrace your steps and then when you’re uh, feelin’ up to walking around, we can see about finding them. Sound good?” 

Silence.

Endric knows that silence entirely too well: tense and brittle, like someone’s just been told the worst kind of news. 

“What do you mean, I…” The girl’s voice rings tight. Thin. “There was no one else _with_ me?” 

“Isn’t that what I said?”

A hitch in her breath. 

_Shit, I probably could’ve been a bit more delicate ‘bout that…_ Endric clears his throat. “It doesn’t mean they’re far, ‘course. They might be close.” 

“Then I need to find them. Now.”

A creak from the bed can only mean one thing. That, and the odd sound of ruffling and shifting feathers. Endric moves forward only to step in more squelchy soup. He hisses out a breath. “Are you kidding me? Take a second to actually breathe, here. You were like, passed out _literally_ in the cold within this last hour. Just an idea, but you probably shouldn’t move.”

“I don’t care,” she snaps. “I’m hardly about to just— _leave_ him. Don’t try to stop me from—”

“Him?”

She cuts off, voice high and hysterical. If what this man is saying is true, then that means the others are probably out in the cold somewhere, too. If Poseidon is still with the others, then at least Emmet and Isobel will be able to keep them all warm, and Ada will be able to heal him if it’s necessary, but if he’s _not_ with them…

“I need to go,” she says, levelling her voice out. “Right now.”

She feels around her waist for her belt, but finds nothing there but the fabric of her clothing. Heart racing, she looks around the room wildly before once again facing the stranger before her.

“Where are my knives?” she demands. “Did you _take_ them?”

“ _Knives?_ What the hell, are you an on-the-go cook or…?”

She hardly hears him. Suddenly, her reflexes are in high-gear, ready to fight if necessary. She hasn’t come this far, all the way to the other side of the world, to lose her brother _now_.

With a flourish and toss of her wrist, the girl sticks her arm out before her, fingers splayed. Her mouth firms into a thin line of concentration; eyes focused and hard and expectant and then waiting and—

—and…nothing.

“You gonna answer my question, or what?”

“Why won’t it _work_?” she all but wails. She pushes her palm outward again, only to find everything is the same as before: still and unmoving. No ice forms, blasted forth from her own creation. No water. Nothing.

Endric doesn’t know what to say to that. “Why won’t _what_ work?” Apprehension grows, a thickening stormcloud in his chest. “What exactly are you trying to do?”

“It was the same before,” she says, voice ragged with laboured breaths. “I don’t _understand_. There shouldn’t be any sort of… Who _are_ you? How are you doing this?!”

“W—” It’s so bizarre. It’s so ridiculous. Endric scoffs out a breathy laugh. They are so beyond misunderstanding each other by this point. Part of him wonders if they are even speaking the same language. “You ask like I have a clue what you’re even doing,” he says and waves his left hand in front of his face. “ _Hel-lo!_ Little bit hard to figure out what’s going on unless you help me help _you_ , yeah?” 

He waits, listening to the silence, giving it its course. Then: “I’m Endric. Now, mind telling me who _you_ are…?” 

Nerissa drops her hands, throat tight. It’s true, he doesn’t _feel_ magical to her, and he seems to be without any weapons himself. Most people who want to kill her don’t spend _quite_ so much time talking to her first, so maybe…

“My name is Nerissa,” she tells him quietly. “I was travelling with my brother and our friends, but I can’t remember what happened…” She stops, biting her lip. “Why doesn’t my magic work here? Is it some sort of...device, or…?”

“Magic?” Endric scoffs and then quickly thinks better of it. The fact she’s got _wings_ throws a lot of preconceived notions out the window from the get-go. How far-fetched would it be to believe that magic could possibly exist in some corner of this wide, sea-sunken world? He’s experienced weirder.

Even if magic seems like one of the weirdest things to actually be proven _true_ somehow.

Where did she say she thought she was again? Uneo?

“Uh, yeah. I’ve got nothing on that. But if it makes you feel better, I’ve never known someone who _could_ do magic.” Yeah, okay; even as he says it, it sounds like a shitty sort of consolation. Endric sighs. “Where is it your brother and you all were headed?”

Nerissa stares at him, aghast, but quickly pushes her concerns away and focuses on the rest of what he’s saying. So, he’s not a Mage, but she guessed that already. He hasn’t heard of magic, and he doesn’t know why hers isn’t _working_ , so there’s no point in pressing him on that.

“The capital,” she says after a long pause. “Where the Civil Front is. Have you heard of a group like that? They’re, well, I don’t really know _exactly_ , but they want a war, and my aunt says everyone in the kingdom knows they do, so…” She considers him carefully, wishing, not for the first time, that she could read people the way Poseidon can. “If you could direct me to where they are, I’m sure I could meet up with the others.”

Endric stares. Were those supposed to be words he was supposed to understand? Was that supposed to somehow clear up this constant miscommunication between them? A Civil Front? _The_ capital? A war? Where the hell was a _war_ even taking place? 

After a long stretch of silence, he does the only thing he can think to do.

He turns.

“ _Mordecai…!”_

* * *

The soup is cleaned up; Endric’s chewed out a bit on account of the rug; Mordecai sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. Frequently. And when the three finally sit down on the guest bed, cross-legged and huddled close enough for their knees to brush, Mordecai passes over to Nerissa a fresh tin of seafood stew and says, “So. Maybe you want to start from the beginning…?” 

“Right.” Nerissa stares intently down at the stew. It smells delicious, but her stomach is in knots. “I was with six others. My aunt Emerson was trying to get the rest of us to meet with some members from the Civil Front, so we would have people to rely on in Erebus when the war started. I don’t really remember much, but…” She stops, eyebrows furrowing. “I remember going through Chronos’s Gate, and I think I stepped—”

Abruptly, she looks up from the soup. “This isn’t Erebus, is it?”

“Erebus?” Endric frowns. Mordecai’s eyes widen and he shakes his head. There’s no known place on all the maps and sea charts he has seen by that name.

“Aether?”

Same reaction.

It shouldn’t be funny. It really isn’t funny at all.

But Nerissa laughs.

She can’t help it, even though the sound of it rings awkwardly in her ears and pushes painfully against her chest. It’s really, _really_ not funny, but, then, it kind of is.

She remembers the first time she ever went through Chronos’s Gate, when she very nearly stepped off the path. Then, Adrienne held on to her to ensure she didn’t, and once they were through, Avery chewed her out for it because “You could’ve _died_.”

Well, she’s certainly not dead.

Once she has composed herself, she looks back down at the stew, thinking hard.

“There are these stories,” she says. “About people who get lost in the space-time continuum, or the Underworld, or...whatever else. They’re just stories, though. Nobody really knows what happens if you venture too far somewhere you’re not supposed to. I always hear things, when I go through the Gate, but since…” She frowns. “If I’m right about what’s going on here, this will probably sound a little crazy. But a few weeks ago, I stopped the sky from falling down, and when I was about to be crushed by it, Chaos—the being that gives all magic and life to the world—bound itself to me and made me, well…” She gestures to her wings, which she figures, by now, there is no point in continuing to try to put away. “I was always pretty susceptible to the Gate, though. It shows you things—the past and the future, in small doses, to lure you away from the path. I think that, because I’m now bound to Chaos as its angel, I’m more drawn to the things in the Gate.

“If...if it _is_ true that nobody else came here with me, then I imagine they’re all in Uneo by now. They probably…” Her shoulders tense up, and she lets her hair fall in front of her eyes. “By now, I’m sure they think I’m dead, or something worse. So...I don’t know where this is, or who you are, but I need to get back. They’re my family. My brother...he’s only twelve. I’m the only person he has left. I need to get back to him.”

Silence rings after her last desperate words.

Mordecai tries to wrap his mind around what she’s said, what the _implications_ of what she’s talking about are, here. A Gate? Space-time continuum? He’s never known any technology or magic like _anything_ she is talking about as if it’s _commonplace._ This Being that gives all magic and all life to the world—Chaos—he’s never heard of it. And above it all, he’d be worried that something had happened to her head and she was making things up or living in a delusional reality—

—if he wasn’t able to see her dark wings and watch the way they moved.

Real, genuine wings. Unlike anything he’s ever seen while crossing all of the known sea-sunken world.

Hadn’t she called herself a bound ‘angel’ of Chaos?

“Mordecai?” Endric prompts quietly, a tone of voice he knows by this point as well as Endric knows every inflection in his.

Mordecai clears his throat. “She’s telling the truth. I can’t...I can’t think of any possible reason why she wouldn’t be. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Course it doesn’t. Nothing about this makes any sense at all,” Endric huffs and Mordecai would be worried for how rude and harsh he sounds, if it wasn’t for that sharp bend to the corners of his mouth that he can identify immediately. 

_It was the comment of the little brother, wasn’t it?_

There’s a long, tense silence again before Endric breaks it with a ragged sigh. He shifts and kicks his legs off the side of the bed. He pushes himself to a stand. “You’re a long way from home, huh?”

It’s an understatement if Endric’s ever heard one, and he’s the one that _said_ it.

He shakes his head; the long, midnight tail of his hair bounces with the movement against his shoulder-blades. “Can’t believe _I’m_ believing this,” he mumbles under his breath before he turns to move for the door. “Space-time continuum...Gate...Chaos...what the _fuck_ —okay then,” he adds, a little louder at the end. “Fine. Eat up. I’ll find you some boots and a coat to borrow. I guess.”

“ _You’ll_ find?” Mordecai asks, leaning back onto his hands with a wry and lazy grin.

Endric’s sigh stretches into a drawn-out groan. “ _Mordecai_ will find you boots and a coat to borrow.” He places his left hand on the door knob to the bedroom and swings it open. “But _then_ we’ll see if we can somehow reach Sasunaq. Again.” 

Mordecai rolls his eyes as Endric stomps away. He turns back to the girl—Nerissa, she had said her name was, right?—and something in him turns tender. He thinks of Eliana. They would be about the same age, wouldn’t they? Eliana’s just turned seventeen the previous month; he thinks of his own family and he aches for Nerissa in a way he knows Endric’s hardened himself to be unable to do. 

“I know this is crazy for us to take in,” Mordecai murmurs. He flattens his fingers against the quilted covers of the bed. “But this has got to be especially hard for you. If you need a second to breathe or panic or take it all in... _take_ that time. Okay?” 

He watches her carefully, rich brown eyes meeting her glacier blues. 

She exhales slowly, a bit dejectedly. “I just need to get back,” she tells him, and is glad to hear that her tone has lost most of its desperation. “I hate to bother you both with it, but I’m sure the sooner I can get back, the better for all of us.” After all, she thinks, the war isn’t going to stop just because she’s not there to fight it, and she gets the feeling that Endric and Mordecai have a more peaceful life here than she has ever had in her own world. From what she’s gathered from Endric’s words earlier, there is no war here. No magic, either, to start it in the first place. Maybe she shouldn’t, but she sort of envies them for it. She has wondered, more times than she would like to admit, how different things might be if she and Poseidon weren’t Mages at all. Maybe they would be peaceful too, or at the very least happy, with both their parents alive and well.

Poseidon isn’t here, though. It’s just her, Mordecai, and Endric, two complete strangers she apparently has no other choice than to trust until she can find her way back to her own family.

Mordecai nods. He chews the inside of his cheek.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “We'll try our best. Okay? But honestly.” How does he put this? “Endric said you had mentioned something about a war in your... _world_ , I guess.” What else do you call where she is from? A dimension? “So believe me. More than you know, I get the whole ‘soldiering on’ thing. But you’re also a kid. And suddenly appearing in a world really different from yours and separated from everyone you know and care about is probably a big shock to anybody...unless traveling across worlds is something you’re somehow used to, I guess.”

He leans back, pressing his hands behind him on the mattress to prop himself up. “What I’m really trying to get at is that it’s okay to get upset. We’re going to try our best to get you home. Who knows if Asdyne or Sasunaq will even _listen_ to us, but we’ll try.”

“I…” She stops, hesitating. He seems nice enough, and she thinks his intentions are probably not _bad_ , but a lifetime of being told not to trust anybody aside from her mother and brother reminds her that even those who _seem_ good can turn just as quickly. Besides, Nerissa has never been a _good_ judge of character. She learned long ago that it’s best to rely on Poseidon for those sorts of things.

He’s not here, though, so how exactly is she supposed to approach...all of this?

“I don’t think getting upset will accomplish much,” she says carefully. “I’m not trying to _act_ tough, or anything like that, I just…” She runs a hand through her hair, trying to find the right words. “It’s not exactly a _new_ feeling to be alone, with only a couple people to rely on. The difference is that the one person who always relied on me is somewhere he’s never been before, and I’m not by his side.” She pauses for a moment, thinking, and then looks up at Mordecai. Her lips twitch up a bit. “I think, if he were with me now, he’d probably be telling me the same things you are, though. He’d tell me my feelings are too loud, anyway, so I should just let them out. I’m not very good at that,” she adds, though she’s sure she’s made that pretty obvious by now. “I don’t feel scared or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m just worried about my brother. Our mother…” She looks away again, pursing her lips. “He doesn’t have anybody else. I’m sure our companions are looking after him, but it’s different. We’re family.”

Mordecai nods.

_Family._

He gets that. “You said he’s twelve?” 

When Nerissa nods, he nods back for a second time. “Yeah. Then we’ll get you back home to him as soon as possible. Or we’ll try to, anyway. I promise.”

* * *

Endric stands mid-calf into the ocean and shivers, wondering how the hell they’re going to even _do_ this. The first time Diana and he ever communed with Sasunaq, they had Arvelle. That first time, things had been different. Sasunaq had reached out to _them_ and all they really had to do was lend her an ear. The second time he communed with her—well. 

He’s never really needed to wonder if the opposite was possible: if _they_ could call upon _her_ and initiate an interaction.

But he thinks of the way Diana marched out to the sea and how they got the _Helene_ and he thinks, _Hey, if she did it, then so can I._

Funny thing is: he has no idea _what_ Diana did or _how_.

He turns. The seabreeze, bitterly cold, lifts up the tail of his hair from his back and blows it over his shoulder. “Any idea how to go about this?”

Mordecai scoffs back. His arms are crossed over his chest to keep warm. “You ask me like I have more experience with this than you.” His voice rings across the frozen beach with teasing amusement. 

Endric scoffs deep in his throat. 

Mordecai hadn’t even been there when Diana secured them the _Helene._

Damn.

“So, is this like a… _prove your worth_ sort of thing?” Nerissa asks. She’s watching Endric, deeply in thought. “My friend Ada made a pact with a diviner by proving herself in a test of magic. I know there’s no magic here, but...is it sort of the same thing?”

There’s a hesitant pause that passes between the other two.

Mordecai snickers and has to turn away. 

Endric puffs out his cheeks. “I can _hear_ you. Why the hell are you laughing, Mordecai?” 

“I just—” He snickers further and presses a hand over his nose and mouth to attempt to stifle it. “—thinking that we’re lucky Sasunaq’s so unpredictable. If it _was_ a ‘prove your worth’ scenario, we’d all be fucked.”

“ _Excuse_ me?”

Mordecai waves a hand and clears his throat. “Nothing.”

“Bastard.” Endric huffs. He turns back around and marches deeper into the sea. As his trousers begin to stick to his pants and the water level rises to his thighs, he hisses out a tight breath. His steps start to slow, socked feet pressing into the mushy bed. “I’m getting fucking _cold_ , so excuse me while I get this over with. You guys better have those blankets ready.” 

“Done and done!” Mordecai calls back, mittened hand curled around the side of his mouth.

He watches then, for the first time, as Endric takes a breath and dives into the sea. 

“He sort of reminds me of someone I know back home,” Nerissa muses. “Is he always so…” She stops, cheeks suddenly stinging. “Sorry, I don’t mean to sound rude or anything. He seems nice. Both of you do,” she adds hastily, embarrassment growing.

Mordecai turns to Nerissa. A humored breath puffs out of him, shaking his shoulders. He smiles widely. For a solid minute, he tosses around in his head just _what_ it is he should say but all he can settle on is laughing. 

“Is he always so…” he repeats, _endlessly_ amused. “Oh, don’t worry. You’re not offending anyone here. But to answer your question, _yes._ He is always…” 

Nerissa lets out a small puff of relieved laughter. “One of my friends is always complaining about the things we drag him through, but he cares a lot, even if he’s not so good at showing it. He wouldn’t let us do it alone, no matter what he says.” She looks down at her feet for a moment, and then offers Mordecai a small smile. “It’s good to have people like that. Ones who don’t give up on things even when they seem impossible.”

Mordecai chuckles. His gaze wanders back over to the horizon where sea meets sky. Even though it is late afternoon, the sun is still high above them. His chest warms. “Yeah. That’s a much kinder way you could describe them than I was thinking,” he confesses.

Nerissa’s lips twitch at that. “I probably wouldn’t have made it sound so nice if Emmet were here to hear it,” she allows. “But since I don’t have to worry about you ever having the opportunity to tell him what I said, I’m sure the compliment isn’t totally amiss.”

Mordecai tilts his head back and laughs. 

_There must be a theme,_ he thinks, _of people whose names start with the letter E._

A splash from the ocean and a ragged gasp announces Endric’s return. There’s a raspy cough and then Mordecai moves. He hands Nerissa the extra blankets and tucks the other under his arm as he wades out to where Endric is, turning around and throwing his arms out in wide arcs around his torso. After a brief struggle, his feet find purchase into the seabed, toes squelching into the clumps of earth. When he stands, his shoulders and upper torso are blasted with cold.

“M-Mordecai—?”

“—I’m here.” He is careful to keep the blanket from dipping into the frigid waters as he wraps the blanket around Endric’s head and shoulders. “I’m here.” 

“Shit,” Endric sighs with relief as his face is enclosed in warmth. “Thank the fucking tide.”

Mordecai chuckles, wraps an arm around his middle, and brings him to shore.

Nerissa watches the two men carefully, trying hard to ignore the fierce beating of her heart in her chest. But her anxiety rings through her voice as she asks, “So, what were you doing there, exactly?” 

There is a part of her that recalls the way Poseidon had fallen into the Sea under Chaos’s command, met beneath the waves by Circe, but she quickly pushes it aside and reminds herself that that is in the past, and Endric is nothing like Poseidon, anyway.

When Endric steps free of the water, a harsh shudder passes through him. It's kind of funny to hear Nerissa sound as nervous and tight-chested as he feels, too, but he stands still as Mordecai wraps blanket after blanket around him and rubs his arms to regain warmth. His teeth chatter together. “I was... _trying_...t-to see if I could reach Sasunaq.” He heaves out a jagged breath. “But it didn't work.”

Mordecai frees up Endric's face with a frown. “What do you mean?”

“I _mean_ I felt pretty fuckin' dumb just floating there, waiting for her to do her freaky mind-thing, but nothing happened. Either she doesn't care, or there's nothing she has to say to me, I guess.” Endric frowns. He would wonder why he doesn't feel more relieved if he wasn't hyper aware of the winged girl with them who was so far from home. 

“Who—or _what_ is Sasunaq, anyway?” Nerissa rubs a strand of hair between her finger and thumb, nervous energy stirring in her chest. “Do you really think she can get me back?”

“Sasunaq goes by many names,” Mordecai murmurs. “But to all, she's the Mother of the Sea. I used to call her Asdyne growing up, but Endric and Qetaq have been rubbing off on me.”

Endric shivers hard again and sneezes. He raises a wet finger to rub under his nose. "If anyone had the power to bring you home, I would _think_ it'd be her. But she's not saying shit, so I guess we're back at square one trying to figure this out on our own."

Sasunaq must be somewhat like the sea nymphs she knows, then. But saying so would likely confuse Endric and Mordecai, so instead she just nods in understanding. “If there were a way for me to use magic, maybe that could help, but…” She sighs. “From what I’ve come to understand about Chaos, everything it does is done for a reason, even if it’s a completely ridiculous one. So if it sent me _here_ , there’s probably something behind that. Maybe we just need to figure out what it is.”

The more and more he hears about this Chaos being, the more and more Endric gets the idea they are totally different—and more benevolent—than Sasunaq.

Endric hisses and turns into Mordecai's warmth. “Okay. Great. At least that sounds like a better plan than nothing. But how the hell are you supposed to find that reason out? If that Chaos thing or whatever sent you here, why doesn't it tell you _why_?”

Maybe benevolent isn't quite the word he is looking for.

Nerissa hums in thought. “Well, I’ve definitely asked that question before myself, but I think the point is that you’re supposed to—” She stops, eyebrows furrowing. Suddenly, she is very aware of the wings sprouting from her back. “You’re supposed to...figure it out on your own. Why it deems you worthy, but not others. It’s been wrong before, you know,” she adds, because it feels necessary. “Just because there _is_ a reason doesn’t mean it’s the _right_ one.”

She isn’t sure, though, if she is talking about her presence here, in this strange world, or the godly magic Chaos blessed her with only weeks ago.

Endric does not know what to make of that. 

He sneezes again and shakes his head. “Yeah, well. That doesn't sound like much to go on.” 

“It may be all we—or she—have for now.” Mordecai squeezes Endric to him and looks to Nerissa. “Let's head back to the house. The longer we stay out here, the less we'll figure out. But if we're there, we'll at least give you time to figure out what this 'Chaos' wants of you and then...go from there. Preferably when we're all warmer.”

“Yeah. _Preferably,_ ” Endric says through sharply gritted teeth.

* * *

Nerissa is quiet the rest of the afternoon.

She keeps to herself with a silence that Endric has no way of reading. Is she a whirlwind of emotion? Is she the calm before a bitter storm? Or is she fine and dandy and minding her own business? He listens as best he can, pays attention to the bits and clues that she _does_ give whenever she talks, but otherwise, he’s at a loss for how their winged guest is fairing. 

Mordecai is his only other tell, but when Mordecai has to step outside to run to the market before it closes, that leaves him alone with her for however long it will take Mordecai to return.

So Endric pulls out the kettle and hangs it above the fire and waits for water to boil. When finally it whistles, he tugs the kettle off its hook and takes it to the counter. “Hey,” he calls out, though he doesn’t know if Nerissa is close enough to hear. He reaches for two metal mugs and hooks his fingers into their handles. “Want some of Mordecai’s stash of his signature hot chocolate? I won’t tell him if you don’t.” 

As it turns out, she is close enough to hear him. For a moment, she turns his words over in her head, and then she admits, “I’ve never had hot chocolate before.”

Endric snickers, glad to hear her voice within the same room. “You know what’s funny? Before I met Mordecai, neither had I.” He crushes some of the cocoa bars into his one fist and drops the pieces into the cups. Add water and stir and a little bit of sugar—or a lot of sugar, in Endric’s case—and voila. Once ready, he tucks his own mug into the cook of his elbow of his stump arm, and wraps his hand around Nerissa’s and turns. “Kay. Where’re you sitting?” 

Nerissa hesitates, then says, “At the table. Right by the fireplace.”

Endric strides over carefully. He sticks his toes into a folded blanket at the table’s corner and drags it to the side. He holds out Nerissa’s mug. “For you. If you hate it, then Mordecai made it.” 

Her lips twitch up a bit at that. “You and Mordecai seem pretty close. Have you known each other a long time?”

He laughs, brightly and happily. After Nerissa takes the mug, he sits down on the blanket, his hand wrapped around his own cup. “Pretty close? We’re fu—” Wait. He can practically hear Mordecai screaming in his own head, _She’s sixteen! She’s sixteen! She’s—_ He clears his throat. “We’ve known each other for...about a year, now? Give or take.” He coughs and takes a long sip. 

“I see.” Her voice is very quiet, even to her own ears. “I would’ve thought it was a longer time, the way you act together.” She pauses to take an experimental drink of the hot chocolate. It spreads warmth through her body, and she relaxes just a bit. “If Mordecai made this, then I have to say it’s pretty good.”

Endric sputters. “If _Mordecai_ made this? _I_ made—” He presses his lips together into a thin line and huffs. He knows what she’s doing; he can spy it a mile away. Grumbling under his breath, he takes another sip. “Yeah, well. We went through a lot together this past year. He’s the first one I met after I lost my sight, you know? I may never have seen his face, but I know him better than anyone.” 

It’s kind of funny to him now that after all this time, that’s how he phrases it: _after I lost my sight._

So vague. So non-encompassing. 

The Endric from eight months ago would have been furious that _that’s_ all he described it as.

He sets his mug down on the table and thinks. “Can I ask you a question?” 

She blinks, letting his words sink in a bit. He’s not exactly saying it, but Nerissa thinks she understands, anyway. The feelings that sort of vulnerability can stir in a person are pretty _big_ things. It’s no wonder Endric and Mordecai seem as close as they do, then.

After a moment, she realizes she hasn’t responded and hastens to tell him, “Go ahead.”

He taps his fingertips against the warm metal siding of his mug to an idle rhythm. “You...didn’t always have those wings. Did you?” 

She knows he can’t see her, but she looks away from him anyway. “No,” she says. “They’re pretty new, actually.” She hesitates a moment, and then explains, “Where I’m from, I’m not really normal. Aside from the magic thing. Sort of. It might be a bit complicated to explain, but...basically, my magic and my brother’s magic is different than anybody else’s. No one else in the world is like us. I think that’s why Chaos chose us.” 

It’s still hard to wrap his mind around that: that she can talk about magic so casually like it exists—because it _does_ to her. What kind of world is that, he wonders? One that does have magic all thrumming through it? That kind of power…

Endric frowns and leans over the table, crossing his arms. “Okay. But then: how come your magic _is_ different from everyone else’s? Did Chaos _make_ it different?”

She takes a sip from the mug, but it isn’t enough to soothe the dryness of her throat. “It’s a genetic thing. Hundreds of years ago, there were two brothers who were gifted magic by Chaos, which they then were able to share with a few other people. I’m honestly not completely sure how that works. But while their magic came from the same place, it took a different form in each of them. One was light, and the other dark. They fought over their differences, until eventually they just split their shared kingdom in two and set up magical wards at the border to prevent people from entering—or exiting. So there were Light Mages on one side of the border, and Dark Mages on the other. But my mother…” She stops, sighs. “She was a noble, the daughter of esteemed politicians in our kingdom. They collaborated with the other kingdom, so a small group could get across. In Erebus, the quality of life is...quite poor. They lost the war all those years ago, and even now they’re paying the price for it. So, the political leaders in Aether thought it was an ideal time to sort of impose their values on the Erebusians. My mom said that their goal was really to gain political power there, and probably use it to eradicate Dark Mages entirely, but...obviously, that’s a pretty big goal, and it didn’t work. My mom was their primary ambassador, because she was young and charismatic, but while she was in Erebus, she met a member of the king’s guard and they fell in love. She chose to abandon her position and elope with him, and they made it back to Aether, where they went into hiding. The Aetherians withdrew from Erebus and the wards at the border were set up again, stronger than ever. The man my mom married was a Dark Mage, so when they had children, our magic was...abnormal, so to speak. Neutral, I guess. We call it Grey magic. So,” she finishes wryly, “if Light Mages and Dark Mages hate each other, I’m sure you can fill in how they feel about my brother and I.”

It's admittedly a lot to take in. There's things that sound so foreign he can hardly comprehend them: wards? Light and Dark Mages? But there are other things that transcend the difference in a magic-bearing world and an unmagical one: political struggles, the toil and suppression of one community by another. Endric's mouth thins into a flat line. Some things don't change even in a whole other world, huh? "Is it that easy to tell?" he mumbles. "That you're a...what, a Grey Mage?"

Is it something others can see, he wonders?

“We call it a magical signature,” Nerissa says. “Mages with strong magical abilities can see and feel them. Not _all_ Mages can, but enough that even those who can’t will hear from someone else if you’re different than they are. It’s not exactly their fault that they automatically want to keep their distance from us, but…”

"Wait." Endric scoffs and he can hear that Mordecai in his head scold him, saying, _You're about to sound mean, you know_ . But has that ever stopped him before? Foot, meet mouth. "What do you _mean_ it's not their fault they want to keep their distance from you…? That's not a fuckin' excuse." 

She ducks her head, head filling with all the things Adrienne used to tell them to keep them safe when they were growing up: Don’t trust anybody, because they’re all a product of their corrupt society. Whether they want to be or not. Everybody will want to hurt you, unless they _know_ you.

“I know that,” she mutters. “But it’s easier to tell myself they’re just conditioned to hate us, rather than that they choose to.”

Endric's frown deepens. "Ain't it both?" He shakes his head and sighs. "Yeah, they're probably conditioned to or whatever, but it's also their own heads up their asses. Like—" He pauses. He retraces the conversation back. He huffs. "—ugh, whatever. I ain't lecturing you. It's not you that's the problem, but you _don't_ have to frame the situation in a way that absolves them of their part in the problem." And that's what he's really trying to say, isn't it? That's what really pisses him off.

Nerissa being backed into some sort of corner that to feel better about the jackasses around her, she has to say their behavior "isn't their fault."

Bullshit.

He doesn't have the patience for assholes like that. Aggressively, he downs the rest of his hot chocolate and sighs. 

Nerissa watches him, surprised. She’s suddenly reminded of Emmet telling her, all those months ago, that he couldn’t understand what she was going through because he hadn’t been “damned for living.” All her life, she’s been painfully aware of the things that separate her from everyone else. Never has she had a reason to feel like people might see her as a person, before a magical abomination.

But isn’t that what Endric is saying now? It’s not _right_ for people to treat her poorly just because she’s different, and she thinks she does know that, but maybe she’s just gotten so used to it that what she knows doesn’t really make a difference anymore.

She smiles, just a bit. “So you are a pretty nice guy after all, huh?”

Endric scoffs but a smile pulls at the corner of his mouth. "Oh, hell no. I'm nothing of the sort." Just a bitter, maimed little bastard. He fingers the edge of his empty metal cup.

“Well, everyone’s always saying I’m a pretty terrible judge of character,” she tells him lightly. “That’s what my brother is good at. He’s smart with people, I’m smart with books. But he’s not here to tell me I’m wrong this time, so I’ll just keep thinking I’m right anyway.”

What does _that_ mean? 

Is she really insisting on this? _This_ is the hill she wants to stand on? Endric snickers. He pushes himself up to his feet. "Well, fine then. I won't deny the ego boost." He won't put up _that_ much of a fight if she wants to think he's—

He takes a step away before he stops. He thinks about what she said. 

"Wait. Are you admitting that you thought I _wasn't_ nice?" 

She splutters. “N-no, that’s not what I meant! I just—well, you’re not exactly all warm and fuzzy or anything like that.” Her cheeks sting with embarrassment, and she takes a long drink from her mug, emptying it of its contents. “You’ve been very kind to me since I got here. Mordecai, too. I…” She worries at her bottom lip. “I’m grateful for that. I know it isn’t really…” She trails off, not sure where all her backtracking has led her. She isn’t _trying_ to grovel or anything, but she has a feeling that it sounds like that’s exactly what she’s doing.

Endric waits, holding his breath. And then—slowly—he starts to laugh. It's a small chuckle at first, but it tumbles out of him faster and harder the more he tries to stifle it. He turns away. "It's a joke, you know," he murmurs. "I'm not _really_ offended."

Oh.

Nerissa lets out a short, shaky laugh. “I guess it’s just been a long day,” she says. “Ada—my friend, I mean, she told me that I would probably be okay now, but ever since I got these”—she gestures to her wings—“I’ve been pretty exhausted.”

These.

These?

Does she mean her wings?

It's the only thing he can think of, unless there's something else weird about her that Mordecai hasn't bothered to point out. He nods and drops his cup into the wash bucket before he wanders back over to the table and sits. "You're talking about your wings, right?" 

She's been...exhausted?

"Just how recent _are_ your wings? I don't think you got around to saying that part of this story." He shrugs, laying both arms down on the table's surface again. "Don't let me keep you awake, though. If you really are exhausted, you _can_ rest. No need to wait for Mordecai to get back before you sleep." 

She shifts slightly, suddenly unable to find a comfortable position. “It’s only been a few weeks, really. Well, I was sleeping for almost a full week too, but…” She runs a fretful hand through her hair. “If you use too much magic, it can exhaust you. In extreme cases, it can even kill a person. That’s what happened to me. Chaos gave me enhanced magic, so I could finish what I came to do, but it was still _too much_.”

“...wait. You lost me again. Are we talking about the here and now? Or is this…?” Endric pauses, grasping for words—for language he hasn’t ever really had to use because he’s never known _magic_ —and tries again. “You’re saying it...constantly...wears you out?” 

She frowns. Never before has _explaining_ felt quite so difficult, and she isn’t sure if it’s because of her personal closeness to the issue, or Endric’s lack of knowledge about her world.

“It’s not constant,” she says carefully. “Just a long-lasting exhaustion, if you use more magic than your body can handle. My brother and I…” She pauses. Sighs. “A few months ago, my brother bound himself to Chaos. By lending his magic to Chaos, which was out of balance because of— Well, it’s sort of a long story, but there once were gods who maintained magical order under Chaos. Since Chaos is just an entity, and supposedly infinite, it doesn’t, like, _regulate_ how magic flows to our world. That was what those gods were supposed to be doing, but they were all wiped out about five hundred years ago. Since then, Chaos has been becoming less and less stable, until eventually it created a shift in the rest of the world. The Heavens—the sky, it sits just below Chaos. It was the first thing affected by the imbalance, so it started falling.”

“No offense, but I can’t even _picture_ that,” Endric mutters. He tries, but what does he see in his mind’s eye? The horizon line lowering? Clouds drifting closer? Stars falling? “Is that why your brother—” Who is fucking twelve, he reminds himself. “—uh...lent his magic to Chaos?” 

He scrunches up his nose because even _that_ doesn’t sit right with him. What the hell.

Chaos had to rely on the magic of one _twelve-year-old boy_ to become stable? 

What the hell kind of giant, supreme—supposedly infinite—being is that? 

“We didn’t know about the Heavens until he bound himself to Chaos,” she says quietly. “My brother is an Empath. It means his magic lets him feel everybody else’s emotions and he can control them, if he wanted to. Which he doesn’t,” she adds. “He didn’t get to choose the way his magic manifested or anything. But because of that, I think he had an easier time sensing what was wrong with Chaos when he bound himself to it. There are old myths about diviners who had to do things that might seem impossible, and, well, they’re called _myths_ for a reason, but we didn’t really have anything else to go on, you know? There’s one about a man who held the Heavens on his shoulders to keep it from meeting with the earth again. So we just tried to follow in his footsteps. It worked,” she says, weary. “Barely, but it did.”

“That’s pathetic.”

Endric’s frown feels so heavy on his face, it’s a weight. It pulls at the scar on the left side of his face, teasing the tail end of it free of its eyepatch covering. “Shit. And _that’s_ the kind of supposedly omnipotent, omniscient power you’re _trusting_ ? Something that had to rely on a _twelve-year-old kid’s_ power to help it stay together and stable? It could give you _enormous_ power or whatever the hell it is it _gave_ you that overwhelms you—it could do that, but not help itself? Why the hell is a sixteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old responsible for the work of _gods_ when it should be the _gods’_ job to take care of you?”

Nerissa bristles. “Well, it’s not like we _wanted_ to have to deal with it. And we wouldn’t have had to, either, if Aether had never killed off the old gods in the first place. Chaos needs regulation, and we were the only people with the _right_ magic to do it. I hardly wanted my brother to have to risk his life to balance Chaos, either, but what other choice did we have? If it had stayed that way, we all would’ve died anyway!”

“Then maybe it’s a fucking _good_ thing you Chaos sent you here!” Endric doesn’t quite know _why_ he’s raising his voice. It doesn’t quite feel appropriate. It’s not _Nerissa_ he is pissed-off at; so why is he yelling at her? He’s never quite been good at managing his anger; not since the day he was stripped of all reason to hold it back. “Maybe you shouldn’t _go_ back. Maybe we should get you and your brother _here_ and force Chaos and that world to stand up for itself. It’s a fucking _god_ , or whatever it is. Let it learn to clean up its own damn messes and not leave it to fucking _kids_.” 

“ _Kids_ ?” Nerissa stares at him in disbelief. “Not to be crass or anything, but we stopped being _kids_ the day I watched our mother die on a battlefield fighting for _our_ right to live in a world that says we _shouldn’t_ . None of it is fair! But it’s what we have, so we need to deal with it however we can! My brother loves our world, and he’ll do anything he can to make sure it can be a place where both of us can exist happily with people who don’t hate us for something out of our control. _Maybe_ we’re both so sick of being _evil_ to everyone that being heroes for a change is actually a _good_ thing!”

“You _know_ that kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight, right?” Endric hisses back. “You’re fighting for something that may not happen in your own fucking lifetime and you’re too _young_ to have already devoted your _life_ to that kind of a purpose. You think everything’s going to be perfect and everyone will suddenly love you guys once you save the world? That’s only _half_ of the battle. You should fucking get _out_ of that mess now, while you can, _while_ Chaos has given you this chance, and you should let them try to save themselves for a change. What do you even owe them, anyway?!”

Nerissa laughs. It is a nasty, bitter sound, born of something much deeper than Endric’s words. “What do I owe them? I don’t _owe_ them anything. I owe my parents, who died so I could live. I owe my friends, who consistently put themselves in danger just by sticking by me but continue to do it _anyway_ , because they learned to look _past_ my magic. I owe every other person who has died in this war because it’s my only chance to see a world where at the very least my brother doesn’t have to worry about being _murdered_ by every second person he meets. Don’t try to tell me you understand any of it! How could you? We live in completely different worlds!”

Endric stands up.

His knees push the table; a jarring slide silences the room as it skids across the floor an inch. Maybe two. 

_Rage_ and _frustration_ are familiar. Old friends; old allies. But the restraint caging every single retort that boils up inside of him is still nascent. Fresh. Unpracticed and messy, but he is trying; _damn_ it, Mordecai. He is trying.

“Fine. It’s your life,” he mutters lowly. “Do whatever the fuck you want.” 

The front door opens.

It takes Mordecai a second to realize that the scene he’s walking into isn’t the one he left. Endric and Nerissa are closer than they had been when he walked out, both at adjacent sides to the low table in the center of their main living space. But there’s a tension in the air; a rigidity to both of their forms that he is all too familiar with.

Mordecai sighs and briefly squeezes his eyes shut. Damn it. “Endric, what the hell did you say _now_?”

“What?” Endric snaps his head around. “Why the fuck is it always _me_?”

“Do you _want_ me to answer that?”

Endric groans deep in his throat, teeth bared in a snarl. “Whatever. Fuck you.” With heavy marches back towards the wash bucket, he snatches the handle up and relishes in the cacophony of all the dirty tinware clanging against one another as they’re lifted. “I’m washing. I need some fucking air.” 

The door slams shut behind him, as if caught in a whirlwind.

Nerissa watches him go with a heavy chest. It’s not _her_ fault, but, well, maybe she could’ve spoken a little more carefully. That’s what Poseidon would tell her, she’s sure. _Getting angry doesn’t solve anything, Issa_.

Maybe Endric could use that advice too, she thinks, trying not to scowl.

With a deep breath, she looks up to Mordecai. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to cause any issues or anything.” Though she doesn’t think that she was the one who _caused_ anything.

Mordecai chuckles and shakes his head. Worry gnaws at the center of his chest, as it always does when Endric explodes like this—but he has bigger things to attend to here. “Believe me. I may not know what just happened here, but I _already_ know it probably wasn’t you.” He shakes his head and strides further across the floor, arms full with his filled crate of food. He lifts an eyebrow at her, still sitting right where she had been when he left. “Want to help me put this away and talk about it?” 

She stands slowly and moves to join him. Though his words should probably be reassuring, guilt swims in her chest.

“It wasn’t _all_ him,” she admits, though the words don’t exactly come out _easily_. “My brother is always saying that I need to work on my temper, but…”

Ah. So they’re _both_ short fuses.

Yes, he probably shouldn’t have left them unattended, then, Mordecai reflects. A poor decision on his part. Probably. But then maybe it’s a good thing; Endric _has_ been working on that temper, after all. He’ll have to see how he handled it. 

“I’ve never met someone more explosive or larger-than-life than Endric,” Mordecai murmurs as he sets the crate down between the ice-box and the pantry. He kneels next to it, and hands up Nerissa the bundles of wrapped seal, saying, “Ice-box, top shelf.” With a small smile, he adds, “He’ll get into fights with everyone, I think—even over the smallest of things. What was it you two were talking about?”

She follows his directions and thinks about her conversation with Endric, trying to remember what, exactly, started it in the first place. She’s never had to explain _why_ she’s an outcast to her own society, because everyone already knows it back home. It makes sense, to them. Sometimes, even Nerissa feels like she is just as filthy as they all think she is.

Endric can’t see that, though. And even if he could, there’s no magic in this world anyway. As far as he and Mordecai are concerned, she’s just a sixteen-year-old girl—with wings, too, but other than it being a bit _weird_ , there’s no reason for them to judge her on that.

When she faces Mordecai again, she says, “It’s a lot different back home than it is here. People have different views, because it’s—well, it’s a completely different culture. Even if those views can be harmful...it is still my home. It’s not perfect, but that’s where my family is, so it’s where I should be too.” She frowns. “I know I shouldn’t want to go back to a place where people hate me, but there are people there who love me too. People who need me, _especially_ right now. Besides,” she adds, lips twitching, “I’m a history student. I don’t want to just leave all my years of studying behind like that.”

Mordecai pauses for a second as he thinks about that, retracing her words to find what the original argument must have been about. What was it Endric must have said that set off all the fireworks?

It’s a bit like playing detective, but there’s something about that he enjoys.

“So let me recap to see if I can get this straight,” he says and hands her the next wrapped pound of meat to stow in the away. “Things aren’t so great for you back in your world. Endric got pissed at that.” Because he would; because the guy doesn’t know how to show that he cares about something unless he gets angry about it. “From what _you_ said, it sounds like he suggested you should stay—” —which is an idiotic thing to say, and even as he says it he has to bite back a smile, because damn it Endric _—_ “—but that’s your home. Even if it’s shit, it’s what you got and what you know and you care about it. So you two fought.”

He wraps his hands around bag of at the bottom of the crate and heaves it to his feet. “Am I right?”

She nods. “I get why it would make him angry,” she says, honestly. “But if I spend all my time angry at my circumstances, all it’ll do is make me miserable. When we were growing up, our mom always told us that the past doesn’t matter, and the future is out of our control, so we should make sure that the present is the best it can be. Sometimes her attitude annoyed me, but she is right that dwelling on the things we can’t change doesn’t help anything. There _are_ things we can change, though, and...even if I don’t necessarily think it _should_ be my responsibility, I’m not stupid enough to think that anybody else is going to change it for me. That’s what I’d like to say, anyway.” She smiles ruefully. “It’s not that easy, though. I do spend a lot of time angry, and miserable for it. I miss my parents, and I think that Chaos is a piece of shit for making my brother and me its messengers or whatever, but I can’t _change_ those things. What I _can_ do is try my best to keep my brother safe, so that’s what I have to focus on to make everything else worth it. If it means he doesn’t have to go through all of it alone, then I’ll take as much of the burden as I have to.”

At some point, after dropping off the heavy rice bag into the pantry and returning to the crate, Mordecai shifted positions from kneeling to squatting. At some point, he rested his elbow against his bent knee and leaned his cheek against his fist as he listened. At some point, a small smile spread across his face. 

Responsibility, huh?

Duty.

A task you are given, that you have no choice but to follow through with.

Anger. Miserability.

Determination.

He can see why Endric blew up in the fashion he did. No doubt, Endric is aware of this, too.

“I think you should talk to him again,” he murmurs, quiet. Gentle. “He’ll come back inside when he’s done with his hissy fit.” Mordecai picks up the crate and sets it next to the wooden counter. “But you should talk with him. _After_ he apologizes. I think it’d be good for both of you.” 

She shoots him an uncertain look. “Are you going to be there to play the referee?”

Mordecai chuckles and shakes his head. “Nope.” 

But when he looks to Nerissa, fisted hands pressed to his waist, his smile softens. “Believe it or not, you guys are on the same side. You just have funny, clashing ways of showing it. Hash it out. Listen to each other. But the last thing you need is someone policing you on how to have this kind of dialogue.” 

Nerissa frowns. She’s certain that, if anybody would know what Endric is thinking other than Endric himself, it’s probably Mordecai. But she has often felt like she’s fated to be eternally _misunderstood_ , when even her own mother could never really “get” what life was like for her and Poseidon. Trusting that anybody else could ever understand what they’ve been through, and will have to go through, is something she’s sure she’s never done before.

She needs Endric’s help, though, doesn’t she? And if they can’t see eye-to-eye on this, it won’t be easy getting it. They’ve already shouted at each other, and if Mordecai thinks there’s more to be said, probably in much lower tones, she supposes she has no reason not to try again. Before they started arguing, they were getting along fairly well anyway, weren’t they?

“Okay,” she says quietly. “But maybe we could save it for tomorrow? It’s been a long day, for all of us.”

Mordecai nods. His smile softens, gentles. “Yeah. Longer for some of us than others,” he murmurs, feeling that traveling across worlds probably took a greater toll on her than he and Endric’s little morning hike up the mountainside. He gestures with a jerk of his chin to the direction of the guest room. “Get some sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

She offers him a quick smile. “Thanks,” she says, and hopes it is warm enough to encompass the gratitude she feels for everything else he has done for her over the past day. “Good night.”

“Night, Nerissa.”

* * *

No matter what might be different in this world, there are some things Nerissa is sure will never stop following her.

Maybe it’s because of her conversation with Endric, or maybe it’s because she can’t get her wings to _go away_ , or maybe it’s just because her mind refuses to let her rest, but though she falls asleep very shortly after settling into the guest room again, the few hours of sleep she manages to get are fitful at best, downright tormenting at worst.

There is Adrienne, and there is Poseidon, and there is Emmet and Ada, and they’re all far away from her, too far for her to touch, let alone _save_ , and when she wakes up her heart is pounding and her eyes are stinging, and she knows that Ada isn’t here to talk to her about it (whether she wants to or not, though lately she finds she is leaning more towards _wanting_ to than she did at first).

She was probably not entirely honest when she was talking to Endric about her recent exhaustion. Certainly, it has less to do with her wings than she implied it does.

But what is she supposed to do now? Her dreams are almost always the same—her loved ones dying, with her powerless to stop it—but this time it feels different. It takes her a long moment to realize that she can’t calm her racing pulse because there is no way to remind herself that the dreams _aren’t_ real. While she would normally find Poseidon at this point, reassure herself that he is very much still alive, she can’t do that here, and she _doesn’t_ know that he’s still alive.

Frustrated, with shaking hands, she reaches up to wipe at her eyes and then gets up from the bed before she can convince herself it’s a bad idea. There’s no way she’ll fall asleep again after _that_ , especially if there’s nobody here to help her separate it from her reality, and being in this room now suddenly feels suffocating.

Hopefully Endric and Mordecai aren’t light sleepers, she thinks; all she really needs is some water and a quiet place to distance herself from the nightmare.

Endric’s not quite sure what wakes him.

The house is still as quiet as it was when he laid down; the kind of serene tranquility that usually means it’s probably some ungodly hour. But there’s a knot in his chest that’s familiar; a prickling up and down his stump arm as if the limb is asleep. It itches and stings and he knows it’s probably going to keep him up for a while longer.

He sighs and sits up slowly. Mordecai is still deep in slumber, so maybe he’ll just—

—there’s a creak of wood.

At first it makes him jump to his feet. His heart pounds hard in his chest. Where did Mordecai put his sword—is there an intruder? Is it one of Ford’s men? Have all of their actions finally caught up with them after so long of peace? 

But then he remembers no—they have a guest. As of yesterday. Today?

Nerissa was asleep before he returned after washing the tinware. He’s not quite sure how she’s fairing after their little spat, but he thinks, as he creeps towards the door of his and Mordecai’s room, that he can hear a sniffle or two.

His hand rests on the doorknob. 

After only a second of hesitation, he eases it open and steps on through. 

“Nerissa?” he whispers. Is she there? Here? Where? Maybe he missed her and she’s already back in the guest room…

She jumps at the sound of his voice, then tenses up her shoulders and hastily wipes away her tears again. “Endric?” Her voice is more hoarse than she is expecting, and she winces at the sound of it. “S-sorry if I woke you.”

He shakes his head, stepping further into the main living space. He brings the bedroom door shut behind him. Let Mordecai get the uninterrupted rest he deserves. "Nah. I didn't know you were up 'til I was already awake." Damn arm and all. He frowns. "You don't sound that great. You all right?" Homesick? Bad dream? 

“I’m okay,” she says quickly. “I just—” She stops as her tears start flowing again. Pushing down the sob which threatens to overwhelm her, she wipes them away in irritation and tries again: “It’s not important.”

Endric pauses.

There it is again, that—

He sighs and shakes his head once more; he can feel his dark hair swing with the motion. It reminds him he’s patchless right now. For a second, he debates getting it, but if Nerissa’s really been fighting in a war, well—she’s probably seen worse.

Endric strides for the ice-box. “Well, _I’m_ thirsty,” he lies and reaches for the pitcher of clean water on the lower rack. “You want some?” 

Nerissa feels her muscles relax, just a bit, and she follows him with careful steps. “Yes, please.”

Whatever simmering ire was still under Endric's skin ebbs. He gentles and nods and when two cups are full, he puts the pitcher away and turns. "Want to sit at the table again?" he asks with a bit of a wry smile. Just hours ago, hadn't it been, that they were sitting there and bitter?

“Sure.” Her voice is barely more than a whisper. It’s sort of ironic, she thinks as she takes a seat at the table again, that _she_ was the one who told Mordecai a conversation could wait until morning, and now here they are, in the exact same place they were only hours before.

Nerissa doubts she really has it in her to get angry about anything right now, though.

The night is quiet, besides the endless and agonizing cycles her brain is taking her through. It’s certainly not tea at Emerson’s table with Ada, but the presence of another person in the room is enough to slow her thoughts down, just a bit.

When they’re seated, Endric pushes over her cup of water. He sips his own, listening to the silence, trying to read what he can from it. If Mordecai has successfully rubbed off on him, he thinks he has an idea on what may be the problem here.

"What'd you dream about?" he asks quietly. 

She looks down at her cup, chest aching. “What makes you think I was dreaming about something?”

So he’s _right._

The corner of his mouth quirks upward. 

“Why else would you be awake at this hour?” he murmurs. “I guess you could’ve been having trouble falling asleep, but then why the tears?” With a shrug, he softens. “I mean, it was also a stab in the dark, but I had a fifty-fifty chance of being right, so…” 

He takes a sip of his water. “Go on, then. What was it about? I promise I won’t chew your ear off this time.” 

She laughs a bit, then brings a hand up to scrub at her eyes. “I… When my mom died, I was there with her. They had to drag me away from her body after.” She hesitates, and then continues, “I dream about that, a lot. But sometimes it’s not my mom. And sometimes it’s someone else who kills them. Ada’s always saying we’re too young to have seen so much death.” Her lips twitch. “I doubt you’re ever _old enough_ to see as much as we have, though.”

_When my mom died, I was there with her._

_They had to drag me away from her body after._

Endric remembers her mentioning that her mother had died. It had cut him then as it does now. His smile stretches wider; turns rueful. It fades after a moment. “You said she died trying to protect you and your brother?” He tries to remember her exact words; it’s hazy from the argument, but he recalls the word ‘battlefield’ being spat in the fray.

Nerissa’s lips press into a thin line. “Sort of. We were staying with a group of government reformists, at the time. Their leader...he was a good friend of my mom’s, when they were kids. By staying there with them, we were offered some protection from a kingdom which otherwise wanted us dead, but…” She trails off, biting her tongue and wishing she could just get the words out, without her eyes filling with tears. “We were attacked there by soldiers from the kingdom. They were led by my mom’s mother. It was her,” she adds, something very sour rising in her chest. “She killed my mom, because she couldn’t approve of her marriage, and she...she thought it was wrong that my mom would rather stay with Poseidon and me than go back to her parents.” She blinks a few times, but it isn’t enough to rid her eyes of their blurriness. She laughs again, but the sound gets caught somewhere between a sob. “Talk about f-family drama, right?”

Shit. 

“That’s messed up,” Endric murmurs, feeling his chest squeeze tight at the thought. They really weren’t safe anywhere in that world huh? He feels his sentiments from before rise up: that frustration with a system and culture that bred such fierce _hate_ enough for a mother to feel justified to kill her own daughter. 

But then he thinks of—well.

He supposes some things don’t really change from world to world.

He clears his throat. “How long ago was that?” 

She squeezes her eyes shut. “A few months ago.”

“Still recent, then.” The words come out soft, a bare whisper. His finger runs up and down the side of his cup. “Damn. No wonder you’re...so worried about your little brother.” It makes sense; it really does. _We’re the only family we have left,_ she had said, didn’t she?

“Sorry,” he adds into the gentle quiet after. “You should be able to feel however you want to about the shit going on. I shouldn’t have...gotten angry. It was stupid of me.” 

Taking in a deep breath to compose herself, she gives her head a small shake. “It’s okay. You were right about some of it. It _is_ unfair, and I wonder, a lot of the time, if it’s even worth it…” She traces an absent finger over the rim of her cup. “I’m a bit of a coward, really. I just try to pretend I’m not because I think it’s what my parents would want, and I know I can’t leave my brother alone. He’s already been through enough as it is.”

“It’s not cowardly to question the role you’ve been handed.” Endric presses his lips together, piecing his words together carefully. “It’d just be cowardly not to, y’know? To accept everything with a blind faith.” 

The corner of his mouth twitches up again. 

“I had to die,” she blurts out, and then bites her tongue, wishing she could take the words but knowing she can’t. She swallows thickly and explains, “When I held up the Heavens, I had to die and be, like...reborn, as an ‘angel.’ I wouldn’t have survived it otherwise. Sometimes I…”

She stops, eyes stinging. _That’s enough_ , she tells herself harshly. There’s no need to be saying any of this, and yet the words are all _right there_ , rising just below her tongue.

Endric’s smile fades fast.

Something in him runs cold at those words: _I had to die._

Damn.

And she’s sixteen.

“Sometimes you…?” he prompts and waits. He holds his breath. 

She grips her cup with one hand tightly and looks down at the water within it as if it can offer her a way out of this hole she has dug for herself.

“It’s stupid,” she mutters, but she knows it isn’t and that’s sort of the problem, after all, isn’t it?

“It’s not stupid.”

The words are heavier than Endric expects them to be, falling out of his mouth. It’s like he can feel the water rise up all around him again. He scoffs, more to push the phantom rush of a current against his skin _away._ “There’s...nothing at all stupid in however you respond to an experience like _that_.”

 _Believe me_ , he hopes she hears.

She can’t look up at him, but something in his tone seems to suggest that he really does believe what he’s saying, that no matter what she could possibly have to say about this, he won’t think it’s stupid. He won’t be disgusted with her, or treat her differently than he does now.

Vaguely, she can see the reflection of her own face in the water, but it is broken up by the small tremors still coming from the hand she has wrapped around the cup.

She says, “Sometimes, I kind of just wish Chaos had left me there to die.”

Endric nods slowly. 

“It’s not stupid,” he repeats. “That’s just being human.” 

Wings or not, that’s still who she is. Magic strong enough to save an entire world or not; power granted by an infinite being or not. She’s human. There’s something to what she says; something understandable. For as much as it hurts, for as much as he knows a sixteen-year-old should never have to feel that—when he thinks of the world she has to go back to and the war she has yet to fight and resolve and all that’s been asked of her...

To say it’s ‘not fair’ by this point might be an understatement.

He thinks of everything else he _wants_ to say: about how many bones he’s got to pick with this Chaos being, about how he _gets_ it—that feeling, about how she’s just a _kid_ and he knows she got upset with him pointing it out last time, but honestly—who _wants_ to fight in a war? Who _wants_ to go back to a place that hates you? 

“You know,” he starts—then stops. Endric lets out a thin breath, wondering if these are the right words. If this is something that would _help._ Or would it seem needless? Does she care to hear? 

Damn. 

“I really suck at this,” he prefaces. “You should know that before you listen to anything else I say.” He takes a breath. “ _But…”_ He lets the word click against the back of his teeth. “I think...this ties into...what bothered me from before. About Chaos, about what you’re forced to go through and do because of it. You’re going to resent what you weren’t able to choose for yourself.”

Endric shakes his head. “And I’m not talking about death here.” 

_I’m talking about your life._

She considers the words carefully. Something in his voice tells her that he’s no stranger to hardship, either. Briefly, she recalls what Mordecai said earlier: _Believe it or not, you guys are on the same side._ If she’s been completely honest, she still doesn’t _really_ get what he meant, but…

“You know,” she says quietly, “I’m really no good at these sorts of things either. It just feels...weird. To talk about it. But—” She stops. Laughs. “Nightmares mess with my head a bit, I guess. My friend told me that it’s probably my subconscious telling me I need to verbalize all the things I’m feeling, but the problem is that I don’t always really _know_ what I’m feeling. I’m not _actually_ scared I’m going to kill my brother, but sometimes I’ll dream about it, and in the morning I’ll wonder if I even have the right to call myself his sister. I’m trying to change things, but I don’t even know where I’m supposed to start if I can’t always figure out what the issue is in the first place.” She sighs. “That doesn’t even make sense. I’m sorry. I just…” She trails off, unsure what mixture of words she could ever come up with to explain what she _feels_. It’s never been easy for her, but Poseidon and Ada are always telling her that she needs to try, because holding all those feelings up inside is only going to hurt her.

Secretly, she doesn’t think there’s much of a point to it, if all that’s happened has already hurt her anyway.

“It sounds like you fear losing control,” Endric murmurs. _You’re going to resent what you weren’t able to choose for yourself._ “I mean: what you mentioned about those dreams, and everything that Chaos has forced you to do...it makes sense when it doesn’t sound like you have a lot of control in practice for your own life. If you’re constantly taking on responsibilities and actions because you feel like it’s what you _have_ to do, you might fear the opportunity when you have to make your _own_ choice because you don’t know what you want.”

She’s always been like that, though, hasn’t she?

 _Like you fear losing control_.

“I guess,” she says slowly, “I haven’t had a lot of chances in my life to differentiate between _wants_ and _needs_.”

Even when they still lived in Derayn, there wasn’t much for choice. Rather than fixating on the things she couldn’t have, it just became easier to cherish what she did. She remembers being jealous the first time she met Emmet, because he owned a _watch_ , of all things. She doesn’t think she’s ever really _wanted_ one, but in that moment, she saw in him all the things she had never had, and he didn’t seem to care about any of it.

What she _wants_ is security and safety, but what she _says_ she wants is simply to protect her only remaining family. It’s not a lie, but it’s not really the truth, either.

And suddenly—just like that, something very ironic becomes very clear to Endric. 

“You want to know something funny?” he murmurs quietly. “I’ve had the exact opposite.” Endric takes a deep breath and lets it out slow. “Which, probably comes across super spoiled. And it is. And was…” After a pause he scrunches up his nose. “Well...maybe spoiled is not the word for it...” 

He shakes his head and chuckles. He reaches up with his left hand to pull back his hair over his shoulder. His fingers, unintentionally, drift across his lower right cheek, where the ridged end of his scar bumps up. “I wouldn’t call myself a pro at anything in life. Ever. But after having to...I guess, remake myself— _twice_ —I’ve…got something, I think, on that whole knowing yourself and owning your life and purpose.” 

Which sounds pretty pretentious, he thinks, but…

“Remake yourself,” Nerissa echoes. Twice, he said. She turns the words over in her head a couple times, and then ventures, “You know...I feel like I’ve told you a lot about my life, but I haven’t heard much about yours.”

Endric shrugs. “It’s a lot less complicated than yours,” he admits with a small smile. “There’s no magic here, for one. No gods or infinite beings—other than Sasunaq, I guess, but even _she_ had a mortal beginning. There’s just monsters. Ghosts. And man. And sometimes, that’s not mutually exclusive.” He takes a breath and thinks about where it was he was going with this—why he even brought up himself in the course of this conversation where Nerissa is, quite honestly, baring herself to him.

They’ve known each other a _day_.

His smile softens. “Bout a year ago, this ship I was traveling on was caught by pirates. They didn’t think too highly of me—don’t know why when I’m _such_ a charmer.” He snickers, but sombers soon afterward. “They wanted to kill me.” 

His fingers tap against the metal cup. “They found out I was a duelist—a professional sword-fighter—and decided, I guess, to get rid of whatever threat I could be. So they cut off my sword-hand, cut my eye, and tossed me into the water.” His lips press together and make an odd _pop_ sound into the silence. “So when I say Mordecai was the first one I met after I lost my sight...he really was. The naval ship he had been enlisted on was the one that saved me. Without them, I don’t think I’d be here.”

Endric pauses, thinks for a second and shrugs again. “But I bring that up because after that—I didn’t have anything. I lost how I made my living. I _lost_...the only thing I had to live for. So there was this series of days and weeks where I had to decide: What do I do now?

“I didn’t have family. I lost them quite a few years back. Didn’t have much in the way of friends or home, either; I was still in the process of carving out a name for myself _as_ a duelist and that required traveling. Competitions. I hadn’t planted down roots and so I didn’t have something to return to. _I_ was the one who decided that I wanted revenge. _I_ was the one who forced the Captain to keep me on her ship so that I could selfishly pursue it. _I_ had to redefine myself and who I was going to be and what I was going to do and because of that, I don’t think I’ve ever questioned _why_ Sasunaq let me live. I answered that question for myself.”

Endric tilts his head. “I mean, I’m also pigheaded enough just to do whatever the hell I want, forget fate or destiny or any higher power’s influence. But I also think...for as much as you try to do the right thing by everyone else, you’ve gotta do it by you, too. Give yourself the chance to determine who Nerissa is and what she wants and what she’s going to do. Not necessarily because of any big responsibility or role in world-altering events, but simply because your life is yours. Not Chaos’s.

“It’s kind of hard to take pride and to love the shoes you’re filling when you’ve only ever been forced into them.” 

Nerissa listens carefully, trying hard to make sure each word he’s saying really gets through to her. It’s not something she’s good at, necessarily; in all honesty, she has a bad habit of talking over people, or assuming intellectual superiority and simply tuning them out. Perhaps the only person she’s never done that to is Poseidon, and that might have more to do with his Empathy than she would really like to admit.

She isn’t tuning Endric out, though.

All the people in her life understand her situation, because they’ve lived in her world with her. They’ll never walk in her shoes, but they can understand perfectly well why they wouldn’t _want_ to. None of the people she’s met since she and Poseidon were attacked in Derayn have needed to wonder why she’s fighting in this war; they can see all her reasons, more solid than the small ghosts that chase her around even here.

But none of these are things Endric can see in her, and for the first time she has found herself explaining the depths of it, has even found herself justifying a system she vowed long ago to never bow to. It changes the meaning of all of it, doesn’t it? Here, her life is a story, and Endric seems to be telling her that she _can_ decide how it ends.

Fleetingly, she smiles. “Thanks,” she says, and she means it. “You didn’t have to tell me any of that, you know.”

Endric shrugs and smiles. "You didn't have to tell me any of yours, either. But you have."

And really, he kind of hates the ashamed feeling that immediately follows: the idea that he's said too much, that he's opened his mouth and spoken too far, assumed that he knew more than he really did about her situation and any help he could offer. He hates it— _this_ is why he's not the kind of guy that could lead armies like Captain Diana or even probably do the things Nerissa has had to do. He's a selfish bastard who doesn't know shit.

He clears his throat. "Anyway, shit. You didn't ask for me to ramble on. How are you doing?"

She had been in tears at the start of this. Conflicted and in pain and afraid. How is she doing now?

"Need more water?" 

“N-no, that’s okay. Thanks.” She stops, hesitating, and then adds, “I’ve been dealing with nightmares for a while now. Usually when I have one, my friend Ada is around to talk to. You’re definitely no Ada, but...thanks for listening anyway.”

Endric chuckles and softens. “Hey, uh. Anytime. Whenever I’m not pissed off at you for somethin’ or other, anyway, I’ll be glad to lend an ear,” he murmurs.

He likes to think he’s getting better at the whole listening thing anyway.

* * *

The next morning, Endric wakes up with a sharp gasp and sits upright, nearly sending Mordecai into a half-awake heart attack. Mordecai falls out of the bed; Endric cries, “I think I’ve got it! Shit! Fuck! I’m a genius!”

Mordecai grumbles into the floorboards.

Half-an-hour later finds Endric excitedly leading the way out to the beachside, retracing their steps in the snow from the day before, with a disgruntled Mordecai and Nerissa in tow.

“Listen. Seriously,” he’s saying as he kicks through the snow with his hand and stump shoved into his anorak’s pockets. “I’ve got it. Because y’know how yesterday I said Sasunaq didn’t do anything even when I tried to communicate with her? I think I figured out why. It’s because _I’m_ not who she wants to talk to. I think it’s Nerissa.”

Nerissa blinks. “What? Why would you think that? I’m not even _from_ here.”

“ _Exactly._ So you’re the person she has to deal with. You’re the person she’s got to send back home. Not me.” Endric spins around while he walks.

Mordecai sticks out his arms immediately. “Please don’t actually walk backwards in the snow.”

“Fine, fine. But you’ve _got_ to admit: it makes sense, right?”

Nerissa looks out toward the water uncertainly. She thinks of the last time she got so close to an ocean with a deep ache in her chest.

“What am I supposed to...do, exactly?”

They come to a stop on the beach, staring out over the horizon. In the morning, the sun has risen high and bright; the sky is just a shade too light to barely be blue. Arches of ice pillar in the distance, up from the water and back to it again while small chunks of ice dust the waters, slowly and lazily drifting. 

“A great question, cuz I’ve only talked to Sasunaq twice myself before.” He tilts his head. “But both times, I was submerged in the water. So it might sound crazy, but I think you should try that.”

She stares at him.

No, she can’t tell herself this isn’t like what happened to Poseidon at all, because at this rate, she’ll be the next to almost drown. Does she really need to _submerge_ herself? And for something that might _not_ actually happen?

She finally looks away from Endric with a small sigh, casting her gaze back to the water. She wouldn’t say she’s _afraid_ of it, but, well, she’s hardly had any _good_ experiences with the Sea, has she?

But, from what Endric said before, neither does he. And he had gone into the water here only days before, trying to help _her_ , so…

“Okay,” she says after a moment. “And if it doesn’t work?”

“That’s why Mordecai brought the blankets,” Endric mutters with a small smile. He pauses, waiting for Mordecai to pipe in, then huffs. “You _did_ bring the blankets, right, Mordecai?”

“Yes, I did,” Mordecai sighs. “Y’know, you could stand to carry a few, Endric.”

“So sorry. What did you say? Don’t think I caught that.” Endric turns to Nerissa. Behind him, Mordecai scoffs. His smile softens. “But a bit more seriously: if it doesn’t work, then we’ll figure something else out. Sasunaq can’t be our only shot; there’s bound to be something else we haven’t thought of that we’ll try. But we won’t give up until you’re home. All right?”

Even if Sasunaq _is_ possibly their best option.

Nerissa takes a deep breath, steeling herself. “Right,” she says, less than confident. “So, I’ll just…”

She thinks back to when Endric did this before. He really didn’t seem to be doing anything _specific_ , but he had waded out into the (super cold) water with what Nerissa thinks was true purpose. So, that’s what she’ll have to do now too, no matter how...daunting it may seem.

She wonders if she should mention that she’s only been in the ocean one time before, and it was in an attempt to save her drowning brother, but quickly thinks better of it. She isn’t afraid. She _isn’t_.

But, well, she _kind_ of is.

Endric waits and waits, but cannot hear the splash of the water or shift of the gravelly sand or any other indicator that Nerissa has approached the sea. His smile slowly fades; he thinks back to the first time he approached Sasunaq. He thinks of the way he himself had clutched to the boulders jutting out into the sea in Aina’s Cove and shook his head and pushed Arvelle away. He thinks of Diana’s courage and the press of her hand onto his shoulder; her solemn resolve of: “I’ll go.” 

He thinks of the way Arvelle had helped him sink beneath the waves. How tightly Diana squeezed his hand when the siren pressed an arm into the small of his back and placed a hand over his head. The quick dunk backwards—

—how terrified he was, but how grateful that he was not alone.

He tilts his head.

“I don’t know if she’ll talk to me. But if, y’know, you’d rather not go by yourself, maybe I can help,” he offers.

If Nerissa’s head wasn’t so wound up with painful memories, she might’ve been embarrassed at how relieving Endric’s words are. But there’s nothing there except the relief, relaxing her shoulders and calming her pulse, just a bit.

“I mean, you _are_ the experienced one here,” she points out weakly. “Not very nice of you to send a sixteen-year-old girl off to do something totally new to her, let alone in a world she’s only been in for—what? Two days?”

Endric scoffs. He extends his stump arm to her. “Hey. In _my_ defense, I did try to warn you about how much of a bastard I am.” 

When she takes his arm, he gently leads her out to the water.

The first thing Nerissa registers when they reach the water is that it’s _cold_. Colder than she was expecting, much, much colder than she remembers the Sea being, but, then, it had been summer, then, and she supposes she hadn’t really been paying much attention to anything but what she was trying to get to. The coldness alone makes her want to turn around and run back to where Mordecai is, but she reminds herself that if she was trying to reach Poseidon then, it’s really not so different now.

He’s probably worried about her, she thinks. He’s probably feeling the same way she did when she had to watch as he fell into the Sea.

With that in mind, she tries her best to ignore the cold, and moves silently onward with Endric until they’re far enough out.

Endric wades with her until the water is up to the middle of their chests. Then he turns and keeps his stump arm behind her, ready. Waiting. It’s an odd thing, perhaps, to notice: the feel of her tight, shuddered breathing from the cold. In this one moment, though Nerissa has seemed so strong and so composed so far, he’s sharply aware of how young she is. How small. The feathers of her wings brush against his arm and he wonders how tightly she has them clenched to her back.

“Take a deep breath, okay?” he murmurs. “I promise; I won’t let go of you until whatever happens.” 

_I’m right here._

It takes two tries to be able to press his hand to her brow; when he does, he can feel her nod. He covers her eyes with his hand, waits for her to fill her lungs. Then, he moves. He bends her back—a dunk—a baptism—a quick press, and then water rises up around Nerissa from all sides—

—and the world is white.

It is long.

There is no seam in the horizon. No stitch to tell where sky meets ground. 

But the endless canvas is split; bent at a point where a young boy, who Nerissa knows the face of better than she knows her own, stands. Though the features of his tanned face are charcoal smeared and smudged, the smile that greets her is warm. Familiar. 

His hands are clasped behind his back. 

For a moment, relief spreads through her, but it is quickly washed away by the realization that she doesn’t know where she _is_ , or if it’s real—maybe this is just like Chronos’s Gate, where everything _seems_ real, but nothing truly is, and if she tries to reach for Poseidon now…

She stretches her fingers out, only for the world to shift.

Then Nerissa is home again.

Not where she should be; not with her friends. 

At _home_.

Her feet kick idly beneath the seat of her chair, swinging to a rhythm she is happily humming. Her spoon bounces from her mouth. There is a honeyed glow cast up the walls of the kitchen of her youth. A broad hand places itself on her wingless back and when she glances up, she sees him. A face—smudged, half-there—that she hasn’t seen in over ten years.

He smiles.

It takes Nerissa a second to recognize the warm peach crumble that melts on her tongue for what it is.

There’s a question here, somewhere. A voice she longs to hear asking her like he used to—

_Satisfied?_

For months, Nerissa has been longing to be with her father again. With her mother, too, who should be wherever he is now. She sees them in dreams, and she remembers too profoundly the feelings that nearly drove her to the entrance of the Underworld, even when Poseidon was right there and needed her.

She told Mordecai, before— _I miss my parents_. More than anything, maybe, but—

That’s not true. Of course it’s not.

She knows that nobody wants to _tell_ her she’s wallowing. Maybe Emmet has thought about it, but Ada would never let him say it. It’s supposed to be a way to help her, but what good is the truth if nobody is telling it to her?

Only a few days have passed since she arrived in this strange world. She has spent most of her time here entirely focussed on getting _back_ , to her family and her friends and the world that needs her. 

_You’re going to resent what you weren’t able to choose for yourself_.

But she wasn’t alone here.

And she has never been alone back home, either.

Her chest feels lighter than it has in months.

“It was what I needed,” she says, quiet. “Thank you...for everything.”

She is sure the words can’t reach him now, and maybe they are not really even intended for him at all, but she hopes Endric can hear them anyway.

There is a warmth in her chest that builds and grows. 

Nerissa’s father—no, _Sasunaq_ —places his hand on her shoulder and squeezes. 

The home of her youth melts away into white.

* * *

Endric isn’t able to determine the exact moment Nerissa is there and then isn’t. He only knows the waiting, the keeping his arm under the back of her anorak jacket to keep her steady, until he begins to realize that it’s not quite as weighted down as before. The jacket is lighter, looser. Drifting against his arm and being pulled along the current.

When he straightens and pulls it up to find the anorak is empty, he knows why.

He slowly wades back to the gravel beach.

“Guess it worked. She’s gone then, huh?” Mordecai’s voice is warmer than the blanket he wraps around Endric. His gloved fingers are warm where they push and allow for open space for Endric’s face. “And just as quickly as she came.”

“Yeah,” Endric rasps back through tight shivers. “Kinda strange. The whole thing kind of feels like a dream, really.”

Mordecai hums in response and wraps his arms around Endric. He squeezes him close. 

“Whatever she was here for,” he murmurs into the top of Endric’s blanketed head. “I hope she found.”

“Sasunaq must’ve thought she did,” Endric mumbles back. “Guess that means Nerissa did, too.”

“You mean she chose for herself that she was ready to return home?”

For some reason, that makes Endric smile. He rests his cheek against Mordecai’s chest as Mordecai rubs his back. “Not that she needed any convincing, but yeah. I think she did.”

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are always appreciated! xx


End file.
